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20 stories from Planck Standard. Latest: September 6, 2026.
Jose Maria Moreno Madrid found De Tellescopiis Stellarum, written by the Spanish Dominican friar Ignacio Munoz. If the attribution holds, Galileo was building four-lens designs at least 13 years before the earliest known example.
Aydogan Ozcan's group used a structured diffractive surface — not software — to overwrite whatever an unknown object looks like with one predetermined image.
The instrument resolves 3-micron detail across 5 square centimeters at 120 frames per second — a combination of resolution, field of view and speed that optical engineers have treated as a fixed trade-off for decades.
A French-German team modulated a gold-and-semiconductor metamaterial so fast that its optical properties change on the same timescale as light's own oscillations — cutting photon losses roughly in half. The result ran in Nature on July 30.
Physicists at UC Riverside found that photographing the detector's mirrors with a commercial infrared camera solves a heat-warping problem that has quietly capped its sensitivity for years.
A new optical technique detects the loss of collagen's molecular chirality — an early warning sign of aging that appears before fibers visibly thin or break.
NTU Singapore researchers used the classic Poisson spot to generate up to four kinds of exotic, knot-like light patterns at once, a strikingly simple recipe for structures that could power future data storage and computing.
A tabletop 'black hole' made of light offers the clearest evidence yet for Stephen Hawking's most famous prediction, and a rare window into quantum gravity.
EPFL researchers develop chip-scale ultrafast laser that matches tabletop performance, potentially revolutionizing medical diagnostics and atomic clock technology.
After 20-year quest, researchers create chip-scale ultrafast laser matching performance of room-sized systems, opening door to miniaturized precision technologies.
Scientists map optical properties of molybdenum oxychloride, revealing strongest light-bending effect ever measured in natural material.
Using gentle electric pulses and platinum contact lenses, chemists at Occidental and UC Irvine molded the corneas of rabbit eyes to correct nearsightedness in about a minute — with no cutting and no laser.
New compressed spectral-temporal coherent modulation femtosecond imaging technique reveals ultrafast phenomena in unprecedented detail with a single shot.
New imaging technique reveals hidden structural changes in ultrafast phenomena, turning split-second events into detailed movies for the first time.
A Monash University team published breakthrough research in Nature Communications showing that deliberately disordered nanostructured metasurfaces outperform orderly ones, achieving broadband achromatic lensing, polarization imaging, and 9 other optical functions simultaneously in a single flat device.
A Monash University team defied decades of engineering convention by demonstrating that deliberate disorder in ultra-thin metasurfaces dramatically multiplies what they can do, publishing in Nature Communications.
Holographic data storage technique uses light's amplitude, phase, and polarization to dramatically increase storage density while an AI model reconstructs the information.
Researchers in South Africa and China found that entangled photons carry over 17,000 distinct topological signatures across 48 dimensions — a free resource sitting in standard quantum optics setups.
New design uses hollow air cavities beneath atom-thick materials to boost optical signals by up to 25 times, overcoming major limitation of thin devices.
New hollow cavity design boosts brightness by 20 times and nonlinear signals by 25 times, overcoming major limitation of ultra-thin materials.